The author isn't the only one confusing the two, a very large % of kids in college confuse the two. They don't even know what they (or their parents) are actually buying, just that it's the required training for a career, thus they assume practical skills are what they are getting.
This is because companies have basically made university vocational training. They don't want to train their employees, so they want the universities to do it. This harms both universities (as institutes of learning) and students, imo, but the companies come out ahead so it pushes on sadly.
Do you have a citation? Every year I get a new load of CS degree students who can tell me what a nondeterministic automaton is, but don't know how to write a PR or write/maintain code in project longer than 1000 lines.
Well, maybe that's why FAANG and the startups cargo culting those companies love to ask Leetcode questions that are closer to academic CS than everyday software engineering.
On the other hand, university courses that cover algorithms and data structures tend to be more about using the Master theorem and doing theoretical proofs than trying to do merge intervals or do 3sum.
